Today’s Poem: Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover?

She’s just not that into you

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Mezzetin, c. 1718 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover? 

by Sir John Suckling  

Why so pale and wan fond lover? 
      Prithee why so pale? 
Will, when looking well can’t move her, 
      Looking ill prevail? 
      Prithee why so pale? 

Why so dull and mute young sinner? 
      Prithee why so mute? 
Will, when speaking well can’t win her, 
      Saying nothing do’t? 
      Prithee why so mute? 

Quit, quit for shame, this will not move, 
      This cannot take her; 
If of herself she will not love, 
      Nothing can make her; 
      The devil take her. 

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Sir John Suckling (1609–1641), aristocrat, wastrel, and inventor of cribbage, belonged to the company of Cavalier poets attached to the court of the English king, Charles I, and his queen, Henrietta Maria. Like his literary confrères Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace and Thomas Carew, Suckling counted himself among the “Tribe of Ben,” intimates and disciples of the older poet and dramatist Ben Jonson. The tribal aesthetic turned on wit, as well as on a throwaway gaiety that we might understand as a type of despair, a tacit conviction that beyond the immediate pleasure you grasp as it slips through your fingers, nothing really matters.  

Sir John Suckling (Wikimedia Commons)

See, for example, Today’s Poem, “Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover?” The poem’s five-line stanzas, in common or hymn meter, with an ababb rhyme scheme, assert the pointlessness of sighing after a girl who, as we in the twenty-first century might put it, just isn’t that into you.

In stanzas 1 and 2, the trimeter second line, reiterated as the stanza’s last line, asks the same question in two different registers. The speaker asks solicitously, in line 2, “Why so pale?” In line 5, repeating the same question, he asks this time what the actual point of being pale is, if she hasn’t noticed your rosy good looks already. “Why so mute?” The question becomes an assertion: If she doesn’t listen when you talk, she won’t notice when you shut up. Again, what’s the point?

In the last stanza, the speaker-interlocutor half-abandons this pattern, stops asking questions and simply proffers advice. Fond lover, this isn’t a you-problem. At least, it’s not a you-problem that’s within your power to solve. Nothing you do will “move” or “take her.” And if you can’t “take her” — “If of herself she will not love” — then let the devil take her instead. The hell with her.

Gordon Browne (1858-1932), Courtin’ (Wikimedia Commons)

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